Dyson Sphere Program: How to build an effective sushi mall in the early game

Anyone who has played this game for more than just a couple of hours has learned that it is important to automate production of common buildings at an early stage.

Convenient designs for malls have been around for years. The most popular one is probably what I call the 5 belt mall: you make belts containing iron ingots, circuit boards, magnetic coils, stone bricks, and gears, and you run those alongside a row of assemblers. Every assembler makes one building type and drops it in a storage box. Here is how Nilaus did it back in 2021, and the design is still pretty current (I still use it, anyway):

However, ever since the Dark Fog update, this design doesn’t seem to satisfy players as much as it used to; people are looking for other ways to do it.

You always needed a bit of a hack if you wanted to expand the mall with buildings that use steel, glass, and plasma exciters, like oil extractors and chemical plants. And the design couldn’t really be extended to make late game buildings either. But it was so easy to make so early on in the game that these drawbacks seemed inconsequential.

But with the Dark Fog update, new buildings got introduced, buildings that use engines and microcrystalline components. The design started to feel top-heavy, people were looking for more flexible designs that could more easily get more different types of resources to all your assemblers.

A lot of new ideas in this direction are currently being developed. The main ideas I’ve seen fall into three categories:

• The most straightforward approach is to start with a 5-belt mall, but to then rush to logistics distributors and transition into making additional buildings using a bot mall. This approach can be quite convenient, and I suspect a large number of players go this route. I’ve made bot malls myself. However, I never quite liked transitioning from the 5 belt mall design to a bot mall; I always end up feeling like I have two half-assed malls. So with my bot mall, I found myself redoing the entire thing and just replacing the five belt mall rather than expanding on it.
• Other players have started to use the new ability to set filters in storage boxes to create lines of storage boxes to distribute all the building materials. The drawback is that every storage box will buffer quite a few items, which is costly and takes a lot of time in the very early game. It also isn’t practical to carry all forty something source materials that way.
• Nilaus’ own response was to embrace bus designs in Dyson Sphere Program. Opinion was divided about this design, mostly because of its voracious space requirements. But it does seem to have found traction, with many players building it and coming up with variations on the theme, probably on account of its ease of use.

All these developments are interesting, but I believe that the best way to get flexibility from the early game onwards is to use sushi belts (also called mixed belts: belts that carry several different materials on them). It should be possible to start building a flexible, extensible sushi mall in the early game, long before logistics distributors are available, that can also be expanded into a late game mall with a small footprint.

When I made this blueprint, it was intended to be placed in the mid-late game. I initially could not work out how to get there in a comfortable way if you wanted to start out early. The main issue is that mk1 belts are so slow. If you have several materials on the same belt, the throughput becomes so poor that the mall quickly slows down to a crawl.

But I think I’ve now worked out a good way to do it, and that’s what this guide is about. It is a step by step tutorial on how to build a sushi mall similar to the one in the picture above, in such a way that it is usable already while you’re still on blue science. This guide will link to five blueprints, four of which fit in the 150 facility limit. The fifth one is stamped down later, when the 300 limit is easily within reach. Each blueprint has some use on its own, but together they allow you to build the entire mall. (Of course you can also look at the screenshots and build everything in your own style). At the end you will also find links to two versions of the full mall.

It should offer roughly the same flexibility and reliability of the bus based design, and it should be roughly as easy to build, but with a much smaller footprint.

Without further ado, let’s get into the actual design.

In broad strokes, the idea is to start with a 5 belt mall, where each of the 5 belts is initially populated roughly like in the normal 5 belt mall, except that each belt must form a loop, and is managed by a 3-way sushi rebalancer. A sushi rebalancer is a device that receives whatever remains on the sushi belt after it’s made its loop past all the assemblers, and restocks the belt with new resources as necessary.

The sushi rebalancers initially don’t have to rebalance much, since the five belts will each just contain one or two materials, but as your game progresses you will be able to easily present new ingredients to the rebalancers, which will then be mixed in with the belt they’re managing.

Once you can upgrade the sushi belts to mk2, the throughput of the system becomes a lot better and you can start to add more materials to the rebalancers. You can get a decent midgame solution with up to 15 different ingredients this way.

The 3-way rebalancers are fed by little bits of factory that receive ores from nearby mineral patches, that will mostly be on the outside of the loop. This suffices early on. However, once you’re comfortably on yellow science, and you have reached the point where you have planetary logistics stations, mk3 belts and pile sorters, you can make a quantum leap by replacing the 3-way rebalancers by five 9-way rebalancers, each fed by two planetary logistics stations, on the inside of the loop, and each piling their materials high on the belt.

The final step is to connect all the output boxes to 15 interstellar logistics stations that will ship your products to anywhere in the cluster.

Pros and cons
I see the following as advantages of this design:

• The mall can be built in the early game, and stays effective all the way into the late game.
• New buildings can be added easily since every assembler has access to every material.
• The mall does not do an excessive amount of buffering, and is quite compact.
• It allows different play styles, by letting you add new materials to the sushi belts whenever you need.

Meanwhile, it has some disadvantages as well:

• Most importantly, it is tricky to achieve a sufficiently high rate of introducing new materials onto the belt, for common materials like iron ingots.
• While you could theoretically proliferate the sushi belts, a lot of common buildings are produced with direct insertion, which nullifies the benefits of proliferation. So far, I’ve always preferred to not proliferate this mall.
• Some people don’t like sushi designs.

Speed
The biggest design problem with early game sushi belts is throughput. If your assemblers receive iron on a mk1 sushi belt that mixes three items, that means that only 2 iron ingots per second can be fed into the system, and that’s not nearly enough for a convenient mall. A lot of your production would be starved a lot of the time.

I find that the following measures address this problem reasonably well though:

• Throughput is the main reason that I’ve chosen this five belt design. If you try to put everything on a single sushi belt, that’s just not going to deliver enough stuff to your assemblers, but with five belts, you can get a lot more done.
• You can improve the performance by upgrading your belts and stacking materials on the belt. The design is such that we start out with only very few materials on the belt, and we only add new materials just after a throughput upgrade. Note that roughly as soon as the mall is operational, you can start to make mk2 belts on it and do the first upgrade soon afterwards.
• The 9-way sushi rebalancer that is ultimately used deliberately mixes materials with an uneven distribution, so you can give priority to stuff that needs a high throughput.
• Finally, if throughput is still a concern for you, you can control which buildings are produced by temporarily setting the number of free slots in the storage boxes for less important buildings to zero. I don’t think this should be necessary to do though, definitely not after you have upgraded the belts to mk2.

Because the entire design revolves around making sushi belts, it’s important to know how the rebalancer works. Here is the three way rebalancer, seen from the front:

The belt on the left is the depleted sushi belt coming in from the mall. It enters a sequence of splitters, each with a box on top. The splitters demultiplex the sushi belt: every type of component on the belt is separated out onto a separate belt that comes out on the back side (see below). To achieve this, each has an output filter set for one of the materials that appear on the belt. The rule for splitters is: if an output filter has been set, then the selected component can only go out through that output, even if the filtered output is blocked and other outputs are free. So all the material will be reliably come out of the correct splitter.

The filtered output is on the back side of the splitters in the previous image, so let’s take a look from the other side:

Here you see the demultiplexed belts coming out of each splitter. Of course, some of the material may have been used up by the mall, so we need to restock these belts. That is what the labelled inputs are for. Here you attach a belt carrying in more of that component. Because the labeled inputs are joined with a T-junction, the material that came from the mall has priority over newly introduced stuff. For example, if a material is not used at all by the mall, it will just stream out of the splitter and turn the corner, without any of the new stuff getting inserted. But if some of a material has been used up, there will be gaps that get plugged with new material.

Then, all the restocked belts are multiplexed again, using yet another splitter that you can see in the picture at the front, and led back out to feed the mall.

There are two more important details. First, the boxes on top of the splitters. The way it works is, if the splitter has an output filter set, then the boxes will only store that particular item. This means that they will work as a buffer: in case too much of the output component is going around in the system, then at some point, the stuff will be coming into the splitter, but the output belt will be blocked. At that point, instead of the system grinding to a halt, the buffer box will start filling up. This can happen, for example, if one of the other products has been temporarily unavailable, or if a new material is added to the belt.

Second, it easily happens that you forget to set the splitter output filter, or you set it incorrectly, or you change things in the wrong order. In that case, some of the components may miss their exit and end up going all the way through all the splitters, clogging up the belts. When this happens, you’ll see some stuff appear on the little bit of belt that you can see sticking out on the left in the picture above. What you then do is simply: correct the output filter settings for the splitters, check that they match the materials on the input belts, and then remove all the incorrectly sorted stuff by just grabbing it from the little bit of belt that sticks out. The belt will start right back up.

Okay! With that out of the way, here is the plan.

In the first phase of the game, you need to get some blue science up and running. You also need to automate production of mk1 belts and possibly sorters as well. You also need to research at least “upgraded logistics system” for the splitters, as well as other blue tech such as steel, electric motors, and foundation.

There are many ways to do this, and it’s not really the subject of this guide. But mostly you’ll need to make some circuit boards and magnetic coils, for which you can use the small iron and copper patches near your spawning location. Put one miner on the iron ore, and one miner on the copper ore. Then have one assembler making magnetic coils, another assembler making circuit boards, and a third assembler making gears, and put each in a box. Now put down a second miner on the iron ore and convert all that iron to ingots. At that point your base will look roughly like this:

Then, make a little research station of three matrix labs making blue science and three matrix labs consuming it, and finally run belts with the items you’ve produced to a bunch of assemblers making: belts, sorters, wind turbines, and assemblers.

Once you got started like this, it’s time to get started on a proper mall.

I really like to build my sushi mall on the pole, for two reasons: it is not the best real estate for other stuff, and you can build literal circular belts there, so the mall looks beautiful there. The disadvantage of building on the pole is that there is limited space to expand, for example if some day twenty more buildings should be added to the game. I’ve tried to make sure that there is some leftover space, even if you build all buildings in the game, but of course you can follow the same principles elsewhere on the planet if you prefer to make a mall that you can extend more easily.

If you’re going to build on the pole, first select the pole where you will have the easiest job: you want iron, copper and stone deposits nearby (which you can easily see if you’ve unlocked universe exploration 1). Once you’ve picked a pole, I then recommend making the innermost belt exactly on the first tropic line that separates a 10 cell area from the first 15 cell area. Building outwards, you then build two more belts, then space for the assemblers, and then yet two more belts, like this:

(If you want to use the blueprints with this guide the belt loops will need to run clockwise.)

This layout will allow you to ultimately build 75 very closely spaced assemblers, which is a good number for a full fledged late game mall. The assemblers will also allow direct insertion between them.

The most convenient place to do the rebalancing depends on which materials you want on which belts.

I think that the easiest way to start, that provides access to the right materials in roughly the right ratios, is to have the following belt allocation, going from the innermost to the outermost belt:

1. Stone bricks, glass, plasma exciters (if you have them)
2. Magnetic coils, copper ingots (if you want them)
3. Circuit boards
4. Iron ingots
5. Steel, gears

With this allocation, the easiest way to lay out the rebalancers is to make the rebalancers for belts 1-3 next to each other (so that you have magnetic coils near where you need them to make plasma exciters). To fill those belts we will have a little assembly line that requires two full belts of stone, one full belt of iron ore, and one full belt of copper ore.

The rebalancers for belts 4 and 5 should also be next to each other; these require two full belts of iron ore.

With those requirements in mind, you can find the most convenient places to build all the rebalancers. Here is the blueprint:

• Blueprint: three way sushi rebalancer[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]

Build one next to the outermost belt, like this:

Then, build two more of them right next to it, such that the boxes are all equally spaced, and hook them up to belts 1-3, like so:

The blueprints below allow you to make all the materials you need for the innermost three belts:

• Magnetic coils, circuit boards, and copper[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
• Blueprint: stone bricks, glass, plasma exciters[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]

Place them next to each other just below the rebalancers. The result should look something like this – but it doesn’t need to be exact, all these structures are somewhat temporary.

You need to hook up the magnetic coils to the assembler making plasma exciters, as indicated. Then, just link all the materials to the right inputs of the rebalancers as per the belt allocation table above, and set the output filters of the splitters accordingly. (You’re gonna forget!)

It’s not a big deal if you flip some belts around or if it doesn’t look super fancy:

Now mine the required ores and hook them up, and your first three sushi belts should start running. As you can see, there are three free inputs that you could add new materials to any time you like.

Of course we still need to do the same thing for the remaining two belts. You can use the following blueprint to make the stuff:

• Blueprint: iron, steel, gears[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]

After hooking it up to the two belt rebalancers, it should look something like this:

Now you’re all done and you can start producing stuff!

You can now make any building for which the materials are on one of the belts, in any place along the belts. I’d start with assemblers and boxes to be able to extend the mall. (The picture below has splitters instead of assemblers for no reason.) Then add oil extractors and refineries, so you can get into red science as soon as possible. Then, you can start building mk2 belts and sorters, in order to upgrade the mall for the first time! (We did not put electric motors or electromagnetic turbines on the belts yet, so you have to produce them inline, but that’s okay.)

From here on, you can just add stuff whenever you need it. It’s important to set the capacity of the storage boxes to just one cell, because the throughput of the design is not that high yet. You might even want to switch off some buildings temporarily if they are hogging all the resources; you can do this by setting their storage box capacities to zero.

You can upgrade the sushi belts and get better performance as soon as you are able to produce some mk2 belts and sorters!

Careful with mk3 sorters
It is important to know that there is an issue with sorter stacking and sushi belts. mk3 sorters with sorter stacking that connect an assembler to a sushi belt will deadlock eventually. So, either use mk2 sorters OR the new pile sorters also seem to work. (Other options would be to use mk3 sorters without upgrading sorter stacking, or mk3 sorters where you explicitly set a filter on each sorter).

In the past, I’ve always used mk2 sorters and found them generally more or less fast enough; for high volume items like belts I’ve sometimes used mk3 sorters with filters. However, it seems that the new pile sorters also won’t run into deadlock, so if that’s true the entire issue is moot.

Expanding until mid-game
The phase where you add materials to the sushi belts and make more and more buildings lasts until you unlock the technologies “planetary logistics system” and “integrated logistics system”.

You can add new items to the sushi belts like engines, high-purity silicon, electromagnetic turbines, processors, graphene, titanium ingots, and particle containers. If you like, you can even just toss these materials directly into one of the unused storage boxes in the rebalancer – but if you do, set its filter first! It’s an easy way to distribute stuff to all your assemblers. (If you did forget to set the filter, unclog the belt by first setting the filter, and then removing the excess that is popping out of the last splitter, as described in the rebalancing section.)

Do keep in mind that we will also move towards the final version of this mall once we unlock advanced logistics options, so don’t spend too much effort on designs that you will want to replace once you have logistics stations.

One thing you can also do at this point is add logistics distributors to all your output boxes. This will allow you to move buildings to Icarus’ inventory automatically, which could be a good quality of life improvement.

This phase starts once you have unlocked the technologies “planetary logistics system” and “integrated logistics system”. You have started to produce yellow science and graphene, and you’ve got some processors going. At this point, you have what you need to bring this mall to its final form.

We will replace all rebalancers with the following 9-way rebalancer blueprint:

• Blueprint: nine way sushi rebalancer[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]

This rebalancer is placed on the inside of the belt loop, so we’ll end up getting a nice, self-contained polar mall. You need to place five of these bad boys; at this latitude the circumference of the planet is 200 cells, so you should use 40 cells (4 big grid lines) per rebalancer. Place them as close to the sushi belts as they can go.

Attach each rebalancer to the five belts. For belts 4 and 5, you can either choose to leave out two assemblers, or you can run the belts in-between two assemblers. (I took the latter approach because I wanted to have all 75 assemblers available to make buildings.) You may have trouble properly connecting the assembler sorters to the sushi belt at the point where one of the belts gets rebalanced; usually they will still fit, just in a bit wobbly way. But sometimes I really could just get 4 out of 5 sorters to work. In that case you can set the troublesome assembler to a building that doesn’t need one of the belts.

Pile sorters are used to stack each material to 4 high on the belt, so as soon as you’ve upgraded them to stack to height 4, the throughput of the design should be more than enough to support whatever you want to build.

When deciding what material to attach to which rebalancer input, you need to take into account the following: the rebalancers deliberately do not produce an even distribution. This is because some materials need a much higher throughput than others – this yet another way to make sure that the mall can support whatever you throw at it. It breaks down as follows:

• Input 1 makes up 1/3 of the output belt.
• Inputs 2-6 make up 1/9 of the output belt each.
• Inputs 7-9 make up 1/27 of the output belt each.

So, you need to make sure that the five most important materials are always on input 1 of one of the rebalancers. I chose: iron ingots, steel, stone bricks, gears, and circuit boards.

Then, you need to make sure that the last three inputs always carry materials that are used in only low quantities. That’s where I put materials such as unipolar magnets, plane filters, graviton lenses, a lot of the dark fog drops, and so on.

Note that every rebalancer is attached to two PLSs, each of which can only import four materials. However, I like to produce some materials in the mall itself, so that I don’t need to provide them. In my design, I chose to manufacture thrusters, reinforced thrusters, crystal silicon, graviton lenses, and annihilation constraint spheres in the mall itself and supply them on the 9th inputs of the five rebalancers. Alternatively you could put down one or two more logistics stations to import those items.

Final note, to make the charged accumulators I have an assembler in the mall itself making regular accumulators, that are exported through an ILS as usual (see next section); a PLS in the center imports them and feeds them through an energy exchanger, then hands them to a rebalancer, so that they can be used to build orbital collectors.

The core of the mall is now finished and you can use it to easily build all buildings in the game, as well as things like logistics drones, vessels, and bots. (I don’t usually make foundation in this mall because I want to produce that in larger quantities and not have it affect production of my buildings.) The final step is to make all those things available on the interstellar logistics network.

The best way to do this depends on whether you want to make a recycling mall or not. A regular mall makes buildings available on the logistics network, so that they can be requested from anywhere in the cluster. But a recycling mall also gives you the option to send back any buildings that you don’t need, so that you don’t have to carry them around in your inventory.

A recycling mall is more work to set up and uses twice as many interstellar logistics stations. If you want to do that, skip to the next section: below we complete the mall without recycling option.

To do so, we need to place 15 interstellar logistics stations in a ring around the design, just outside the storage boxes. This will place them across the next tropic line, a region with a circumference of 400 cells. To place 15 ILSs, each needs to take up 400/15=26.66… cells. The most convenient way to place them is to find the distance from the pole where you’re just barely allowed to place them 26 apart. I found that to be 4 cells into the next tropic out. You then place the first such that its center is aligned with the center of one of the assemblers. Then place the second one at the same distance from the pole, as close as possible to the first, the third gets one cell extra, the one after that also gets one cell extra, and then as close as possible again… rinse, repeat.

Then hook up the five closest storage boxes to each ILS, and set them to export the corresponding buildings (both locally and globally).

I usually limit the ILSs to store just 100 of each item, because that is the amount you will receive when you request that item from somewhere across the cluster, and you don’t want to receive 2000 miniature particle colliders. The only exceptions are items of which you do want to receive more in one go, such as belts, sorters, solar panels, smelters, ray receivers, and so on. You also need to set the “min load of vessels” to 1% or 10%, to make sure that vessels will not wait until more buildings are available, but will actually fly out with however many buildings are available at the time.

The capacity for each storage box connected to the ILS should be set such that it can hold the same number of a building as the ILS. For example, if the ILS can hold 100 chemical labs, then since chemical labs stack to 30, set its storage box to 3 or 4 slots.

All the ILSs export their buildings locally and globally, but I don’t usually equip them with drones, just vessels. To make sure that you can receive buildings even in some godforsaken mining world with no power, all ILSs should be equipped with warpers; I import warpers on one of the ILSs and then run a circular belt with warpers through all ILSs. I also set one mall assembler to production of a trickle of warpers (using the default recipe); those warpers are side-loaded onto the warper belt. In principle, warpers are imported, but if warper production fails for whatever reason, the mall can produce its own.

To make sure that the ILS is restocked quickly after it has shipped some building somewhere, it’s best to use pile sorters to connect the storage box to the belt that leads into the ILS.

There are 15 ILSs which means one logistics slot for each assembler. One slot will be used to request warpers (I like setting the corresponding assembler to make the backup warpers). This leaves 74 slots to export whichever buildings you like.

To make a recycling mall, we first place the 15 importing ILSs in a ring around the design, just outside the storage boxes. This will place them across the next tropic line, a region with a circumference of 400 cells. To place 15 ILSs, each needs to take up 400/15=26.66… cells. The most convenient way to place them is to find the distance from the pole where you’re just barely allowed to place them 26 apart. I found that to be 4 cells into the next tropic out. Place the first two towers 27 cells apart, such that an assembler is centred exactly on the middle between the two ILSs. Then complete the circle of ILSs, each time placing the next one 26, 27 and 27 cells from the previous one. (This is easy to measure since 26 is the smallest distance that fits.)

Now make a second ring of 15 exporting ILSs that go in-between the ones you placed before, slightly further out from the pole. Make them as close to the pole as they can go.

Unfortunately we can no longer keep the storage boxes we have been using so far, so delete all of them. Instead, for each exporting ILS, place five splitters, as in the image below:

The middle splitter is aligned with the exporting ILS. Run belts from the 5 closest ports of the importing ILS on the left to the left-hand inputs of the splitters, and run belts from the top exits of the splitters to 5 ports of the exporting ILS. Finally, connect up the splitters with belts from the five closest assemblers. Now, set the splitters to prioritise input from the importing ILS, and put boxes on top. These boxes replace the output boxes we had before.

We will now set up the importing and exporting ILSs with the five buildings connected to the splitters. I usually limit the exporting ILS to store just 100 of each item, because that is the amount you will receive when you request that item from somewhere across the cluster, and you don’t want to receive 2000 miniature particle colliders. The only exceptions are items of which you do want to receive more in one go, such as belts, sorters, solar panels, smelters, ray receivers, and so on. You also need to set the “min load of vessels” to 1% or 10%, to make sure that vessels will not wait until more buildings are available, but will actually fly out with however many buildings are available at the time. Exporting ILSs are set to local and global supply, but I don’t usually equip them with drones, just vessels.

The importing ILS is set to the same five buildings, and its outputs are selected to match the buildings from the assemblers. In this case, leave the storage capacity at maximum, but set every building to “local storage” and “global demand”. Importing ILSs also need “min load of vessels” set to 1%, and need to be equipped with vessels.

Put storage boxes on the five splitters. Set the capacity for each storage box such that it can hold the same number of buildings as the ILS. For example, if the ILS can hold 100 chemical labs, then since chemical labs stack to 30, set its storage box to 3 or 4 slots. You may also put a logistics distributors on top if you expect to hang around near this mall a lot (but I usually don’t really in the late game once I’ve left my home world).

To make sure that you can receive buildings even in some godforsaken mining world with no power, all ILSs should be equipped with warpers; I import warpers on one of the exporting ILSs and then run a circular belt with warpers on the outermost belt ports of all the exporting ILSs. I use splitters to branch the warper belt to also supply each importing ILS. I also set the mall assembler corresponding to that import slot to production of a trickle of warpers (using the default recipe); those warpers are side-loaded onto the warper belt. In principle, warpers are imported, but if warper production fails for whatever reason, the mall can produce its own.

To make sure that your mall works well in all respects, I like to add an alarm system using traffic monitors.

Put a traffic monitor on one of the belts connecting to the exporting ILS. Set its cycle length to 60 seconds, its flow rate to 0 and its condition to >. Now set it to raise an alarm on “fail and no cargo”. Copy this monitor to all belts connecting to the exporting ILSs.

Now make another pass around all the traffic monitors and set their alarm icon to the building on their belt. This way, once a building is not being supplied to the ILS, and no new buildings have been supplied for a minute, you will be informed about exactly which building is making trouble. You can then click on the alarm icon on the top of the screen to get a guiding line to the part of the mall with an issue, and you can hopefully address the problem.

If all went well, you should now have a beautiful mall that looks a lot like either the first or last picture of this guide.

If not, you were either lazy or you messed it up. In that case, you might try my own implementation of the design, which you can find here:

• Blueprint: regular sushi mall[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
• Blueprint: recycling sushi mall[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]